Tag Archives: wealthy

The RNC dilemma: how to transform service to a wealthy minority into populism and votes

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Jonathan Chait discusses the RNC Growth & Opportunity Project:

The Republican National Committee released a major report today that amounts to the party’s formal response to its 2012 election defeat. The report determinedly avoids confronting the party’s most fundamental problem: Its attachment to an economic agenda that most voters correctly identify as serving the needs of a wealthy minority. Rather than confront the problem, the report is a detailed and generally shrewd plan for working around it.

[...] The closest the report comes to advocating a policy response for non-rich voters is its call for “making sure the government’s safety net is a trampoline, not a trap.” Everybody obviously wants programs for the poor to help the poor advance. But what does this mean? Paul Ryan always talks about the safety net as a trap that lulls the poor into laziness, and his budget likewise devotes enormous space to “repairing” the safety net, which he defines as slashing subsidies for health care, food, college, and other fripperies so poor people get off their lazy butts and make something of themselves. Is that how the RNC wants to stop the safety net from being a trap? Or does it propose the opposite? The report does not even hint.

[...] The vast majority of the report devotes itself to advocating a lengthy series of mechanical campaign fixes. The most interesting of them are a call to cut the number of presidential primary debates in half and to undertake a vast effort to eliminate restrictions on political donations. The aggregate effect of these changes would be to have Republicans spend less time communicating their ideas via moderated public debate, and more time communicating them via crafted propaganda. Whatever the civic merits of the idea, it appears to be a shrewd gambit to present a more appealing face to the public.

Or as Charles Johnson says,

“Bottom line: the RNC report is a set of recommendations on how to better trick voters into supporting the GOP, even as the GOP continues to work against their interests.”

Political Wire: “Tucked in near the end of the 97-page autopsy “are less than four pages that amount to a political bombshell: the five-member panel urges halving the number of presidential primary debates in 2016 from 2012, creating a regional primary cluster after the traditional early states and holding primaries rather than caucuses or conventions,” Politico reports. Each of those steps would benefit a deep-pocketed candidate in the mold of Mitt Romney. That is, someone who doesn’t need the benefit of televised debates to get attention because he or she can afford TV ads; has the cash to air commercials and do other forms of voter contact in multiple big states at one time; and has more appeal with a broader swath of voters than the sort of ideologically-driven activists who typically attend caucuses and conventions.“

Benjy Sarlin highlights the RNC’s commitment to skillful rhetoric: 

Less than year after nominating a millionaire investor who proclaimed that “corporations are people,” the RNC is concerned that the party has become too closely tied with wealthy interests. “We have to blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attack corporate welfare,” the report says. “We should speak out when CEOs receive tens of millions of dollars in retirement packages but middle-class workers have not had a meaningful raise in years.”

The report doesn’t offer much beyond rhetorical suggestions here — it actually recommends loosening campaign finance laws to allow corporate money to influence politics even more — but it does acknowledge the issue is a legitimate threat. “The perception, revealed in polling, that the GOP does not care about people is doing great harm to the Party and its candidates on the federal level, especially in presidential years. It is a major deficiency that must be addressed,” the report reads.

You see, it’s “perception” that must be addressed — not beliefs, deeds, or actions. The takeaway for conservative voters: the beatings will continue until moral improves.

Igor Volsky laughs at the “disconnect between the principles and rhetoric the RNC espouses and the policies the party continues to advance:”

“We have to blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attack corporate welfare. We should speak out when a company liquidates itself and its executives receive bonuses but rank-and-file workers are left unemployed. We should speak out when CEOs receive tens of millions of dollars in retirement packages but middle-class workers have not had a meaningful raise in years.” Republicans have proposed slashing the corporate tax rate just as corporate profits are skyrocketing and wages for middle and lower income Americans remain stagnant. The GOP seeks to repeal Wall Street reform and resists any efforts to tax capital gains at a higher rate, close the carried interest loophole, or raise any taxes on higher-income earners. Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget, for instance, “would result in tax cuts worth an average of about $330,000 a year to households with incomes of more than $1 million a year.”

The Democratic (obvious?) response to the RNC’s Lipstick on a Pig Plan:

“I think it’s important to note that the best way to increase support with the public for your party is to embrace policies the public supports. And embracing policies the public does not support or aggressively rejects makes it more difficult to earn the public’s support.” — White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on Monday.

What else can be said?

Bush’s tax cuts on capital gains are the biggest contributor to rising income inequality

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While we consider how we are just days away from devastating sequestration cuts (which the Republican Party has decided is superior to closing tax loopholes for the super rich), take a look at why there’s such a huge gap in income inequality in America today:

Changes in tax law that reduced the federal tax rate on capital gains income is “by far the largest contributor” to rising income inequality in the United States, according to a new paper from Thomas Hungerford, an economist at the Congressional Research Service: By far, the largest contributor to this increase was changes in income from capital gains and dividends. Changes in wages had an equalizing effect over this period as did changes in taxes. Most of the equalizing effect of taxes took place after the 1993 tax hike; most of the equalizing effect, however, was reversed after the 2001 and 2003 Bush-era tax cuts. [...] The large increase in the contribution of capital gains and dividends to the Gini coefficient, however, is due to the large increase in the share of after-tax income from capital gains and dividends, and to the increase in the correlation of this income source with after-tax income. 

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We’ll stop talking about George W. Bush when the things he did while he was president for eight years stop affecting us today.

Paul Ryan’s history and his family’s history make his entire political career a sham

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“[Paul Ryan's] entire life, and the history of his entire family, makes a lie out of everything the man has said in his political career, and a sham out of every policy position he purports to hold. It seems to be there used to be a word for that. What I do know is that, in 20 years, a lot of people in the Beltway who are in my business today are going to look at what they’ve written and said about this faker, and drink themselves into early graves.” — Charles P. Pierce

Charles P. Pierce lays out the ugly facts:

  • Born wealthy — has “amassed a fortune of “between three and $7.7 million” without having held a more lucrative job than “Congressman” at any point in his adult life.”
  • His family owes their wealth to government highway construction: “The Ryan workload from 1910 until the rural interstate Highway System was completed 60 years later, was mostly Highway construction,” and who said on Saturday morning, alongside the King of Bain,”I’m proud to stand with a man who understands what it takes to foster job creation in our economy, someone who knows from experience, that if you have a small business — you did build that.”
  • Bought a mansion which is cared for by a federal agency, the National Park Service, because it’s listed on National Register of Historic Places.
  • Mr. Ryan reported two tax-deferred college savings plans, with a combined value of between $150,000 and $300,000. He also reported two investment partnerships worth, in total, between $350,000 and $750,000, mostly containing shares of stock in well-known companies, including Apple, Goodrich, Kraft Foods, Visa and Whole Foods. Both partnerships were formed by Mr. Ryan and other family members to manage assets left by his grandparents and an aunt.
  • Mrs. Ryan has reported receiving a trust after her mother died in 2010 that is valued between $1 million and $5 million, according to a letter Mr. Ryan filed with his latest financial disclosure. Mrs. Ryan also has longstanding interests in several mining and oil exploration investments in Oklahoma and Texas managed by her father, Dan Little, a lawyer in Oklahoma whose clients include oil and gas companies. Those investments generated as much as $150,000 in income last year.

Just follow the money, any of it, to where Romney-Ryan have already or would like to redistribute it from the bottom to the top for their own personal gain. Less government though. You built that though. The deficit though. Too much spending (on the poors) though. Go tea party.

Study: having money makes people more likely to act like assholes

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In case you wondered about that. When Romney says he’s not concerned with the very poor, believe him.

NY Mag: Paul Piff published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that made him semi-famous. Titled “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” it showed through quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that,

“...living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially speaking, dehumanize people. It can make them less ethical, more selfish, more insular, and less compassionate than other people. It can make them more likely, as Piff demonstrated in one of his experiments, to take candy from a bowl of sweets designated for children. “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff says, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.””

Harry Reid: Romney didn’t pay any taxes for 10 years

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And suddenly Mitt’s reluctance to release more tax returns makes sense:

In a wide-ranging interview with The Huffington Post from his office on Capitol Hill, Reid saved some of his toughest words for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Romney couldn’t make it through a Senate confirmation process as a mere Cabinet nominee, the majority leader insisted, owing to the opaqueness of his personal finances.

“His poor father must be so embarrassed about his son,” Reid said, in reference to George Romney’s standard-setting decision to turn over 12 years of tax returns when he ran for president in the late 1960s.

Saying he had “no problem with somebody being really, really wealthy,” Reid sat up in his chair a bit before stirring the pot further. A month or so ago, he said, a person who had invested with Bain Capital called his office. 

“Harry, he didn’t pay any taxes for 10 years,” Reid recounted the person as saying.

This guy wants to be president and with the amount of information he’s been willing to release so far, he wouldn’t even make it through a senate confirmation! Think about that for a minute.

Mitt Romney is an extremely wealthy man propped up by extremely wealthy donors

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How to buy the White House (aka political investing for profit):

“About four dozen donors and families have given at least $1 million to super PACs this election cycle, with three-quarters of them giving to the GOP. Combined, these four dozen donors have provided $130 million of the $308 million super PACs have raised this cycle (more than 40 percent) — a reflection of how much these outside groups are funded by extremely wealthy donors. And that goes double on the GOP side, where nearly half of the $228 million raised by super PACs has come from about three dozen million-dollar donors. [...] Topping our list, of course, is the family of Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, which has combined to give more than $36 million (including funds given by their children). Much of it has gone to a super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich in the Republican presidential primary, but more recently the couple gave $10 million to the top super PAC supporting Mitt Romney. [...] The point? Democrats are making the case that Romney is an extremely wealthy man propped up by extremely wealthy super PAC donors. And at least for now, with super PACs carrying the load for Romney in the early ad wars, there’s a lot of truth to that.” — The Fix’s super PAC Millionaires Club – The Washington Post

What do they hope to get for the millions they’re pouring into Romney? More money, more tax cuts, loopholes, and subsidies, paid for with austerity cuts for the rest of America.

Related: 

Like Mitt Romney, the world’s super rich are hiding at least $21 trillion offshore (Where’s the tax returns?)

image: christopherstreet

“This is now a country run by the rich, for the rich.”

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In his review of Paul Krugman’s and Timothy Noah’s books, Felix Salmon reflects on what’s happening with the wealthy and the rest of us today:

“Rich people have more power than poor people, and they use that power to get what they want — which is, normally, more wealth and more power. Across America, politicians invariably reflect the views of their richest constituents. And the Federal Reserve, too, appears to have been captured by the rich: It seems much more worried about the specter of possible future inflation (which might be bad for the rich) than it is about the tragedy of present-day unemployment (which is calamitous for today’s jobless)…. This is now a country run by the rich, for the rich. And nothing in either of these books gives me reason to believe that there’s any hope of changing that.” 

Electing Mitt Romney would be that final nail in the coffin for those who aren’t wealthy.

Bill Gates supports Robin Hood tax

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The wealthiest man in the US has put his support behind a tax targeting the wealthy which would be given to the poor. (via: aljazeera)

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Rick Perry’s “stupid, nonempirical, corrosive mindset” regarding people who pay no federal income tax

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DOES ANYONE BESIDES THE TEA PARTY BELIEVE THIS ASININE RIGHTWING HOGWASH? Here’s what Rick Perry said when announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination for President, “We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax.” What a turd this guy is.

The GOP’s Reverse Class Warfare | Andrew Sullivan: Scott Galupo is indignant:

The sweeping 1986 tax overhaul that Reagan signed into law broadened the tax base, closed loopholes, and lowered individual income tax rates. It also established the Earned Income Tax Credit program, or EITC, which eliminated millions of the working poor from the rolls altogether. Expanded by President Clinton in 1993, the antipoverty program has been a smashing bipartisan success. Now it’s become commonplace among the right to question whether such programs are “fair.” …

The idea that the middle class—or whoever Rick Perry means by “We”—is suffering because the lower classes aren’t paying taxes; the idea that the rich would create more jobs if their share of national wealth was even more heavily concentrated; the idea that, if everyone had “skin in the game,” the economy would somehow improve, even as the beneficiaries of programs like the EITC are bearing the brunt of the Great Recession—all this is, to put it bluntly, a load of crap. It’s a stupid, nonempirical, and corrosive mindset.

Via PoliticalProf: Sorry for letting facts get in the way, Rick, but here goes:

As the Tax Policy Center’s Roberton Williams has explained, “a couple with two children earning less than $26,400 will pay no federal income tax this year because their $11,600 standard deduction and four exemptions of $3,700 each reduce their taxable income to zero. The basic structure of the income tax simply exempts subsistence levels of income from tax.’…

Of those households that do not owe income taxes, about a third earn $10,000 a year and a slightly smaller share earn between $10,000 and $20,000. More than three-fourths earn $30,000 or less….

Two-thirds of the households that pay no federal income tax still ante up for payroll taxes. Fewer than one in five — 18 percent of all households — pay neither income nor payroll taxes. Nearly all of these are elderly (10 percent) or have incomes below $20,000 (7 percent.)…

Examining the total tax burden — state, federal and local — Citizens for Tax Justice calculated that the top 1 percent of households (average income, $1.3 million) earned 20.3 percent of income and paid 21.5 percent of taxes in 2010.”

From Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post.

Really, who wouldn’t choose an annual income of between $10,000 – $20,000 rather than a millionaire’s because of federal income tax? And if these poor, beleaguered millionaires don’t amass even more of the nation’s total wealth, what in the world will happen to all those jobs they’re supposed to create after they’re finished hoarding the excess?

/sarcasm

Why do poor and working-class conservatives support tax cuts for the wealthy?

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THIS ACTUALLY MAKES SENSE. Essentially this article from The Economist is saying that some people near the bottom are worried that if our nation’s economic inequality were improved somehow, those now at the bottom might match or surpass those just above them. And those people would rather see the rich get even richer than see people in a lower economic class move up to their level or beyond:

Instead of opposing redistribution because people expect to make it to the top of the economic ladder, the authors of the new paper argue that people don’t like to be at the bottom. One paradoxical consequence of this “last-place aversion” is that some poor people may be vociferously opposed to the kinds of policies that would actually raise their own income a bit but that might also push those who are poorer than them into comparable or higher positions…

In keeping with the notion of “last-place aversion”, the people who were a spot away from the bottom were the most likely to give the money to the person above them: rewarding the “rich” but ensuring that someone remained poorer than themselves. Those not at risk of becoming the poorest did not seem to mind falling a notch in the distribution of income nearly as much. This idea is backed up by survey data from America collected by Pew, a polling company: those who earned just a bit more than the minimum wage were the most resistant to increasing it.

Poverty may be miserable. But being able to feel a bit better-off than someone else makes it a bit more bearable.

That kind of psychology is probably impossible to overcome — especially when combined with religious and political ideology. It reminds me of something Robert Reich called The Republican Strategy, which is, in part:

The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class – pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don’t believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.

By splitting working America along these lines, Republicans hope to deflect attention from the big story. That’s the increasing share of total income and wealth going to the richest 1 percent while the jobs and wages of everyone else languish.

This “Republican Strategy” is exactly what we’ve been dealing with for at least three decades — and especially now from the rank and file Teaparty base and their continued support of extending tax cuts for the wealthy, in opposition to their own self-interests.

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Cause of the still terrible job market? The wealthy and the “great consumer bust”

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Joshua Holland at Alternet discusses the fallacy of the wealthy as ‘job creators’ and the fact that without working- and middle-class consumers, there isn’t a need for more jobs. And without good jobs, Americans have no money to spend:

Consumer demand accounts for around 70 percent of our economic output. And with so much wealth having been redistributed upward through a 40-year class-war from above, American consumers are too tapped out to spend as they once did. This remains the core issue in this sluggish, largely jobless recovery. The wealthy, in their voracious appetite for a bigger piece of the national pie, are the real job-killers in this economic climate.

Don’t take my word for it. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that “the main reason U.S. companies are reluctant to step up hiring is scant demand, rather than uncertainty over government policies, according to a majority of economists” the paper surveyed. That jibes with what business owners themselves are saying. Last week, the National Federation of Independent Businesses released a survey of small businessmen and women that found widespread “pessimism about future business conditions and expected real sales gains.”

New York Times reporter David Leonhardt wrote this week that “We are living through a tremendous bust. It isn’t simply a housing bust. It’s a fizzling of the great consumer bubble that was decades in the making.”

Related:

The GOP’s newest budget plan: cut services to the poor and elderly, don’t touch the wealthy

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“The president and I do not agree on his view that the government needs more revenues through taxes on job creators.” —- John Boehner, July 11, 2011

Smacking Into the Debt Ceiling: the Day-by-Day Consequences

“Remember when the United States was so politically paralyzed that it risked its credit rating and international credibility by refusing to hike the debt ceiling?”

So how do the Republicans and John Boehner want to save money? Brian Beutler reports on a secret memo left behind at the White House on Monday:

Though the memo lacks key details about many of the cuts, it contains enough to show where, exactly, Republicans hope to achieve savings. Its largest single source of savings — $100 billion worth — comes from what the memo terms “Medicaid FMAP Reform,” or matching funds to state governments for providing Medicaid services.

It calls for up to $53 billion in savings from instituting new cost-sharing protocols for so-called Medigap policies — supplemental insurance sold to Medicare beneficiaries to cover the cost of services not covered, or partially covered by Medicare. Specifically, it would institute a $530 out-of-pocket premium for certain Medigap plans. It also calls for over $80 billion in additional cost-shifting for home health coverage, and for medical and prescription drug coverage.

More information when we get it, but for now, read the memo here.

Of course it would be silly to let the tax cuts expire for the wealthy. There are just too many services that can be cut before we have to resort to such cruelty.